let out a startled laugh. ‘I fear so. My first instinct is to ask you to help me—but after the way in which I have treated you, I hardly dare to.’
It was Jack’s turn to laugh.
‘You may ask me anything you like: anything.’
‘That is a kindness which I hardly deserve.’
Jack ignored this.
‘No time to waste,’ he told her severely. ‘Help me to get him on to the sofa.’
‘And after that?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
Together they lugged the snoring Henry up from the floor and arranged him artistically on the sofa. He muttered a couple of words which sounded like ‘Tally ho!’ and promptly went to sleep yet again.
‘What now?’ asked Lacey anxiously.
Jack considered the unconscious Henry with a judicial eye. ‘He looks safe enough there to me,’ he pronounced. ‘Let’s leave him and finish the dance together. You can regard it as a thank you to me for rescuing you from that half-wit. I sometimes think that he was the original of P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.’
It was Lacey’s turn to laugh. ‘What a splendid notion. But whatever will people think if I Charleston into an anteroom with one partner and come out with another?’
‘That you are the most original American girl who ever set sail from the tall towers of Manhattan.’
He held out his arms to her and she sank into them as though she were coming home. Both of them, while they whirled and twirled away from the unconscious Henry, could not stop laughing. They were still laughing when they reached the ballroom and began to decorate the Charleston with some original steps of their own.
Jack had not enjoyed himself so much for years. Irresponsibility held him in its thrall as it had done when he had been young and silly before the world went mad. Then, he might have been like Henry, sleeping it off on the sofa. Now, he was the recipient of Henry’s folly, being given the chance to dance with a girl with whom, quite without meaning to, he was beginning to fall in love.
What she was feeling for him, he thought ruefully, might be quite a different matter. For the present, though, he would take what fortune, that fickle goddess, was sending him and What ho! and Tally ho! he would be taking her to Wembley.
Aunt Sue’s thoughts when she saw Lacey emerge from the anteroom with Jack, after entering it with Henry, are perhaps best not recorded.
Jack and Lacey were in a world of their own. The strong attraction between them, which had been sparked off at their very first meeting, was growing more powerful by the minute. The dance ended all too soon for them.
Breathless, they stepped back. Lacey gasped out, ‘What a pity that my programme is full. We go so well together, and at the very least you are still sober—which I am sure will not be the case with all my future partners.’
‘I promise to rescue you again if any of them are as far gone as young Laxton was,’ promised Jack gallantly. ‘You have only to run up the Stars and Stripes and I shall come at the double.’
‘And ruin my reputation completely.’ Lacey laughed. ‘Now you must escort me back to Aunt Sue. I think that it would be better if you didn’t take me into supper. I daren’t imagine what all the old gossips are saying about us.’
‘They say, let them say,’ quoth Jack. ‘From what I have seen of you so far, Miss Lacey Chancellor, what other people say about you doesn’t concern you overmuch.’
Before she could answer they had reached Aunt Sue, who now had another lady of uncertain years for a companion. Jack had seen her before. She was yet one more of his distant relatives, Mrs Anna Harley, who was noted for her plain speaking.
‘Tell me, do,’ she cried, snapping her over-large fan at the pair of them, ‘what you have done with Henry Laxton. I trust that he’s still in the land of the living. He was being very forward with you, Lacey, before you disappeared, I hope that young Jack hasn’t been too severe with him.’
‘On the contrary, Cousin Anna,’ replied Jack quickly before Lacey’s aunt could add a rider to her friend’s comment since he feared that it might be over-critical of the pair of them, ‘I helped him to have a nice lie-down on one of our cousin Lynch’s more comfortable sofas. If you will all excuse me, I shall make it my business to find a footman who will be sure to see that he’s looked after before he ventures home.’
His cousin snapped her fan at him again. ‘Off you go then, young Jack. You were always a resourceful villain, as I well remember. You must tell me where you have been hiding since that wretched war was over. I want to hear all the latest news about poor William, as well.’
Jack, amused, exited bowing, as the old playwrights had it.
Lacey was equally amused. Aunt Sue would not now begin to reproach her while Jack’s cousin remained with them. Surprised to learn that she was his cousin, and that their hostess was another, she said, ‘You are related to Mr Compton, then?’
‘Who? Oh, Jack! Why, yes, I’ve known him since he was a boy. Sterling fellow, Jack. A bit wild when he was young, but aren’t they all? Miss Lacey could do worse than set her sights at Jack,’ she continued, much to Lacey’s secret, and further, amusement. ‘He may be as poor as a church mouse but he’s worth a hundred Henry Laxtons for all that Henry’s a Duke’s heir.’
Aunt Sue, who had privately decided that Henry would be just the thing for Lacey, even if he were a few years younger than she, was somewhat put out by this curt dismissal of him and even more by Anna’s unwanted praise of Jack, but she could not say so.
‘Mind you,’ continued Anna, ‘it’s some time since a Duke, or his heir, married an American heiress. Are you acquainted with Miss Cornelia Vanderbilt? I understand that she is going to marry the heir to the Amherst barony shortly. I hear that a fortune is to be spent on the day of the wedding. Pity they’ve not got better things to do with their dollars—if you’ll forgive me for saying so.’
Aunt Sue didn’t want to forgive her but, knowing that Mrs Harley was a powerful member of high society despite having no title before her name except a mere Honourable, which was a nothing of a thing since it was never used in public, had to grin and bear her freely offered opinions in silence.
Fortunately for her peace of mind and her hopes of her niece making a grand marriage, Lacey’s next partner arrived early in order to claim her for the waltz. He had the good fortune to be none other than Peregrine, Viscount Harcourt, the heir to a Marquess who had managed to hold on to his money and estates despite the depredations of the recent war.
That Lacey, as she later told her aunt, found him a dull stick after Jack, was not to the point. Aunt Sue was determined to press her case and prove that in the marriage stakes Miss Lacey Chancellor, whose mother had been one of New York’s Hoyts, was an even better bet than Cornelia Vanderbilt!
That being so, it was a pity that Mrs Harley continued to support Jack’s claim to be Lacey’s suitor all the time that Peregrine and Lacey were dancing a sedate waltz. The only thing which gave her any relief from her worries was that Jack did not return to trouble them. He had, according to Peregrine—who was also distantly related to him—left early, saying that
